Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [326]
LATE ON 6 August 1945, a Top Secret signal flashed from the Twentieth Air Force to Washington, where the time difference caused it to be read just before midnight the previous day: “Subject: Bombs Away848 Report 509 SBM 13 Flown 6 August 1945…1 a/c bombed Hiroshima visually thru 1/10 cloud with good results. Time was 052315Z. No flak or E/A opposition.” This was followed almost immediately by a second signal: “Altitude: 30,200 feet…Enemy air opposition: Nil…Bombing Results: Excellent.”
“Little Boy,” “an elongated trash can with fins” in the words of one of Enola Gay’s crew, scrawled with rude messages for Hirohito, exploded 1,900 feet above Hiroshima’s Shima Hospital, 550 feet from its aiming point. Tibbets, a supremely professional bomber pilot, described this simply as “the most perfect AP I’ve seen in this whole damn war.” The 8,900-pound device created temperatures at ground zero which reached 5,400 degrees and generated the explosive power of 12,500 tons of TNT. All but 6,000 of the city’s 76,000 buildings were destroyed by fire or blast. The Japanese afterwards claimed that around 20,000 military personnel and 110,000 civilians died immediately. Though no statistics are conclusive, this estimate is almost certainly exaggerated. Another guesstimate, around 70,000, seems more credible.
The detonation of “Little Boy,” the mushroom cloud which changed the world, created injuries never before seen on mortal creatures, and recorded with disbelief by survivors: the cavalry horse standing pink, stripped of its hide; people with clothing patterns imprinted upon their flesh; the line of schoolgirls with ribbons of skin dangling from their faces; doomed survivors, hideously burned, without hope of effective medical relief; the host of charred and shrivelled corpses. Hiroshima and its people had been almost obliterated, and even many of those who clung to life would not long do so. As late as June 1946, an official press release from the Manhattan Project asserted defiantly: “Official investigation of the results849 of atom bomb bursts over the Japanese cities…revealed that no harmful amounts of persistent radio-activity were present after the explosions.” Yet even at that date, thousands more stricken citizens of Hiroshima were still to perish.
Truman received the news aboard Augusta, four days out from England on his passage home from Potsdam, as he was lunching with members of the cruiser’s crew: “Big bomb dropped on Hiroshima August 5 at 7:15 p.m. Washington time. First reports indicate complete success which was even more conspicuous than earlier test.” The beaming president jumped up and told Augusta’s skipper: “Captain, this is the greatest thing in history.” At Truman’s behest, the officer carried the signal to Byrnes, eating at another table, who said, “Fine! Fine!” Truman then addressed crewmen in the mess: “We have just dropped a new bomb on Japan which has more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. It has been an overwhelming success!” The president’s delight was apparently unburdened by pain or doubt. He simply exulted in a national triumph. Here was a vivid demonstration of the limits of his own understanding of what had been done. Sailors crowded around the president, asking the question on the lips of millions of Allied soldiers, sailors and airmen across the world: “Does this mean we can go home now?”
In the U.S., first reaction to Hiroshima was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. The British embassy in Washington reported: “The lurid fantasies850 of the comic strips seemed suddenly to have come true. Headlines sagged under the weight of the drama and the superlatives they had to carry.” There was much unseemly flippancy, for American skins had been thickened by forty-four months of war. The Washington Press Club produced a sixty-cent “atomic